“... in Laurencin’s work, and femininity its primary theme. In Woman with a Fan (1912), a probable self-portrait, she rhymes the twisted coil of her braid with the unfolding pleats of a fan and the sloping curves of shoulder, neck and breast. Pablo Picasso and Jean Metzinger had both painted several pictures of women with fans in the preceding ...”

“... voice extra attention. She was said to prefer it, but it was set aside in favour of something more self-conscious.The album opens with the title track, about the Baader-Meinhof Group. The first thing you hear is a squiggle of synth. Reynolds brought in Steve Winwood – whose musical career stretches from the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic in the 1960s to the ...”

“... with him and a stroll with him, a letter from his wife (the slavishly devoted Mme Émilie Teste, self-professed ‘plaything of a muscular knowledge’, who reminds me of a story about Wallace Stevens, once asked by a rather forward interviewer what his wife was called, and saying in surprise ‘Mrs Stevens’), a letter to him from an unnamed friend, a ...”

“... the arrival of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the MRP split over his announcement of a referendum on self-determination in Algeria. The party’s long-standing leader, Georges Bidault, joined the paramilitary OAS, which launched armed resistance against de Gaulle in the name of Algérie française and narrowly failed to assassinate him, while his colleagues in ...”

“... least by the Continental regime she most disliked, which sat in Rome. The otherwise impregnable self-confidence of The Downing Street Years falters disarmingly whenever its heroine comes to Europe. The titles of the chapters speak for themselves. The ordinary triumphal run – ‘Falklands: The Victory’, ‘Disarming the Left’, ‘Hat Trick’, ‘Not ...”

“... purpose and experience in Vietnam and beyond, but only O’Brien’s book, a work of fiction, is self-consciously so. All three books were published near a date that has far more significance than the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam and the final, cataclysmic withdrawal of American forces from Saigon – 30 April 1975. April 30 1995 was also ...”

“... or promissory notes that would go begging in their own country. The Axial Age launches a self-reinforcing pact of coin and sword. Payment of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that ...”

“... got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in 46 of the 50 ...”

“... multiplying range of personae. It’s curious that this man, so conspicuously lacking an authentic self, evidently regarded his single most authentic feature as a curse and a stigma. After Lillian Rose was born in April 2005, Rachel grew homesick and Neil, whose weakness for shopworn slogans is abundantly on display on his websites, embraced the idea of moving ...”

“... et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage, and declare the balance of risk and ambition in the two self-evident. Comparisons of this sort have been the staple of art writing for a century. And of course the writers had a point. The style Cézanne can be seen building from 1873, out of the Pissarro materials, is in the end more turbulent and perplexing than ...”

“... at the Edinburgh conference in 1974: for legal and financial independence, and for the right to a self-defined sexuality and an end to discrimination against lesbians. A seventh demand was passed at the final conference in Birmingham in 1978: for freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital ...”

“... Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair number of motifs are traced between one film and another, and between Kubrick’s experience and what went into his ...”

“... to see and touch, to believe in the humiliation of Vladimir Putin. There are tanks, a huge self-propelled howitzer and armoured troop carriers into whose burned-out insides everyone peeks to see if their occupants have left something of themselves behind. The hulks are both disturbing and ridiculous, redolent of death and of hubris. The great slabs of ...”

“... intimately relevant to the understanding of the paintings. Indeed the landscape in this case was self-consiously shaped by the artist’s aesthetic, made to look like a Monet painting so that Monet could paint it. But it is only in the rarest of instances that a writer’s house discloses anything so immediately pertinent to the achievements that have ...”

“... the comic and the adventurer, were diligently cultivated by Coryate – he was a great self-publicist – and both are expressed in his best-known book, Coryats Crudities, published in 1611. The Crudities gives an exhaustive account of his travels in Europe, but his long peregrinations in the East are more sparsely documented. His last extant ...”